Main menu

Bamboo and training

"Marketability and advocacy - not enough to provide education/training, but there needs to be some vision." (W2, Analyzing Directions, group B)

"How can Bamboo develop training programs that will be of optimal use/relevance to faculty's research/teaching, programs that will catch the interest/commitment of humanities researchers, many of whom don't have much experience with IT." (W2, Education and Training, questions and concerns, plenary notes, group 10)

"What forms should education/training/outreach take? Through what processes will B help people discover each other/tools/resources? What would training look like? Most effective form? Should PB specialize or generalize? Who should PB be training? Every faculty/student? Admin? IT staff? Collaborators?" (W2, Education and Training, questions and concerns, plenary notes, group 9)

"How do we create a method that encourages multi-directional flow of teaching and learning, colleague to colleague? (In some of the language, suggests faculty need to learn stuff from technologists/librarians; there needs to be learning going in multiple directions)." (W2, Education and Training, questions and concerns, plenary notes, group 4)

"The word "training" is a bad word; concerned with grouping along with professional development. Part of what PB's got to do is come up with productive ways of using technology in humanities work. Training is incidental to that - you have to show them what button to click on, but you're not training people in the big picture, people are learning and internalizing methodologies. Training is a reductive term." (W2, Education and Training, discussion: should "Education" be split?)

"Main distinction is between education of students and professional development of faculty within/across institutions. It's not only faculty that need development; it's librarians, technologists, all support structures too. With or without the term "training", keep operations out of all discussions; any words alluding to "how" institutions do things will get a lot of pushback." (W2, Education and Training, discussion: should "Education" be split?)

"To what degree can we anticipate that humanities scholars will be receptive to Bamboo offerings? Is this Bamboo education or bringing together training providers? Will Bamboo be of interest to scholars and to what degree? What are the good models from other education projects? How will this work in terms of it staffing for smaller institutions? How might this be different from large R1 institutions? How can we connect people at r1 institutions to smaller institutions?" (W2, Education and Training, questions and concerns, group 10 notes)

"Worried about training for faculty. Need something more meaningful--not just learning software. Training if it's needed is a bad sign. Clearing house of success. As for training, faculty are willing to invest a lot of time if its close to their research. There needs to be trust that services will be stable. We are not afraid to do hard work but do not want to waste our time. Can Bamboo develop training programs that will be relevant to research and teaching? What is the relevant training for humanities and arts faculty that Bamboo can bring?" (W2, Education and Training, questions and concerns, group 10 notes)

"the methodological turn - digital humanities was easy for scholars who came from textual studies - anything methodological (editing, corpus linguistics, prosopography). Not so easy for scholars who are working more consciously from theoretical and interpretive standpoints. How to get at this?" (W2, Education and Training, questions and concerns, plenary notes, group 2 notes)

"Reward: economy of scale would be greatly increased by reaching out to faculty who are otherwise untrained/uninterested in digital humanities" (W2, Education and Training, plenary notes, risks and rewards)

"Risk: Remain aware of differences in levels of support (resources, will to pursue Digital Humanities initiatives) that are extant at different institutions/kinds of institutions" (W2, Education and Training, plenary notes, risks and rewards)

"How to go forward: skills development and knowledge transfer, so what skills and how? Need examples as a way to start to raise the awareness/skills. Examples: success stories, project reports, use cases, scenarios. Want to see what kind of training materials/programs there already are." (W2, Education and Training, plenary notes, plan)

"Don't want to think about all the possible skills, knowledge, etc. between now and workshop 3, so we're choosing "annotate" as an area of focus. A demonstrator here - for scholars who want to use annotation, what would be some examples? What kind of training materials are there? What could there be? Who's doing what? What kind of templates? Clearinghouses, tools, etc.? Don't have enough water or heat to make a full pot of rice, but we'll take a couple grains and see what it takes. Didn't want to go all the way with a solution, but imagined a website or wiki that had all this info would be a great place for researchers, support staff, etc. to look in. If the whole PB community had a place to share this knowledge and skill, even if it's just links to courses, that'd be a great help." (W2, Education and Training, plenary notes, plan)

"Bamboo needs to recognize best practices on multiple levels; to serve as an advisory body rather than coming up with new tools; will be enormously helpful for students and faculty. what skills are important for students to have? BUT, we need to learn to speak to people in humanities---not use terms like "best practices" but need to get an initiative through Bamboo to bring about this. Bamboo could advocate, through a consortium of faculty, for digital humanities literacy---it could put forward vetted proposals for teaching/research methods. perhaps we need to ask ourselves what does a humanities scholar need to learn now that they didn't learn 20 years ago? what particular kinds of literacy does it need to advocate? thus, we can imagine Bamboo would establish and disseminate standards and practices for digital humanities. it could come up with standards of best practices, or awareness-raising programs, associated with different categories in Bamboo (ie annotate) etc. consider having a formal way of coming together regularly to talk and then go out to professional organizations and carry out workshops or units." (W2, Education and Training, risks rewards and plan, group notes)

"question is: who is the target audience? Bamboo would have a different program of work for a different audience---what are the core skills are we trying to develop? we should also think about levels---think about different levels of intervention? workshops or summer course? important to note it's not just a problem of IT asking faculty what they need, what they want to do...in fact faculty need to first know what's available to them." (W2, Education and Training, risks rewards and plan, group notes)

"if there were a set of recommended set of tools, activities, this might be most useful - acting as an advisory group. advantage of having a set of tools exist outside of institution is not being subjected to whims of institutions---tools provided by Bamboo? however, perhaps Bamboo would not create passive collection of tools, but actively communicate to institutions best kinds of tools and best uses of those tools. how to do this so that it will have an impact? simply offering training seminar usually doesn't work. think about putting together a scalable model." (W2, Education and Training, risks rewards and plan, group notes)

"Should differentiate between: 1. teaching (everyone) how to use IT; 2. teaching (grad students, and undergrads) humanities-related enquiries and subjects through IT; 3. teaching (faculty) how to use IT to teach or otherwise research and convey humanities-related enquiries and subjects through IT; 4. teaching (faculty, and grad students) how to teach (graduate students, and undergrads) the use of IT to teach or otherwise research and convey humanities-related enquiries and subjects through IT" (Education working group, 11/20/08 memo)

"The Education working group should identify and define ways in which Bamboo can best support the professional development of faculty and staff about approaches and methods for the use of digital technologies in research and teaching in the arts and humanities. In particular, the group should consider the professional development challenges of a world in which individuals will create, repurpose and remix tools and content through the use of shared technology services. The group shall explore similar ideas for educating and developing undergraduate and graduate students. This can include a range of approaches from teaching individual skills to formulating curricula to mentoring. Finally, the group shall propose ways in which the different and diverse communities engaged in Bamboo can learn from each other and in doing so, develop an ongoing and shared understanding of the research and learning challenges and opportunities within the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences." (Education working group charter)

""Education" deals with teaching three different kinds of skills:
a) The specifics of how to use hardware and software;
b) Methodologies for applying this hardware and software to Humanities research;
c) The critique of this hardware and software, using longstanding arts and humanities methodologies.
Faculty interested in teaching these skills to students may themselves desire training in how best to do so.
The interaction between scholars and IT can come from two directions:
a) There exist technologies with capabilities that could take scholars' research in new directions--if the scholar knew about them.
b) The scholar has research and/or pedagogical needs that are not met by existing technologies.
Project Bamboo could address the first of these by highlighting existing technologies of potential use to Humanities scholars. To address the second, Project Bamboo could aggregate scholars' requests for the technologies that match their needs and create a clearinghouse of relevant demonstrator models (with metadata relating to complexity, cost, required commitment, etc).
As a preliminary step towards accomplishing the above, it would be helpful to survey working group participants about the state of Digital Humanities on their campus and what stories, resources, or tools they have available to share as potential demonstrators for the community at large." (SN-0012 Bridging Technical Capacity and Scholar Needs, Mark Williams, 1/9/09)